RCS – How We Do it With a Live Example

You have probably seen the team at SEER using “RCS” (its gaining some steam) in more and more tweets. If you are wondering what it means, it means Real company shit (or stuff for the more PC of us). Its what my entire presentation at Mozcon was about.

It’s our attempt to take an industry we love and encourage all of us to do the same things REAL COMPANIES DO! Real companies rarely build their business on shortcuts and tricks, yet we as SEO’s were winning so often with shortcuts and tricks.

I also got sick of watching good ideas get pummeled by clients from time to time while giveaways on Facebook were getting 50x the budget I was getting to develop real content. I could find a market need, it made sense for them to address it, yet for some reason someone higher up wanted it to become a sales piece, or didn’t buy in to answering people’s questions, or was spending all their money on a Facebook giveaway.

So we decided to start building stuff in OUR vision, in labs so to speak. We hope these things give you guys some concrete examples to take to your bosses and get your budgets to go do RCS yourselves. Lets show the world what “SEO” practitioners can do when given a budget and the ability to be creative. So here it is, how do some of your favorite startups make their money.

Here is the thought process I went through to develop the idea, the people who helped, and what I’d like to do with it next.

1 – I looked for a market need by NOT HITTING ENTER on my Google searches

OOOH Lookie here

So we decided to answer those questions for people.

2 – Now I got social proof that people are looking for this, lets do the research

I got our newest hire at the time (relocated here all the way from Kansas City) – Sam Hendrix to go find the answers for us before he moved here, and he did, complete with sources, loaded them up in a Google doc and we were off to the races.

3 – Someone has to build it

I begged o3 world to build this for us, they are right across the street from us, and do killer work. I didn’t want a great idea to turn to crap b/c we didn’t buck up for killer designers. So we bucked up.

Ofcourse, o3 being o3, was like…we’re making this responsive…so when you load this up, go load it up on your tablet and your phone…it’s pure awesome sauce. No seriously, go read this on your iPhones, Galaxy Nexuses, iPads, Transformer Tablets, its SERIOUSLY so cool.

B/C this was a design and SEO collaboration, it had to be indexable, so yeah check out the code…it should be (but that wasn’t 100% my goal anyway).

And that is the process, find an audience need, do the research with sources, and build it right.

Oh that leaves step 4, promote it.

I was hoping to send this over to the folks at venturebeat or mashable would get wind of this (hint, hint – anyone got a connection for me?) and think that it would fit their audience.

But this was less about promotion and more about where SEER is trying to go in terms of building RCS. We sneakily showed this to a few clients and immeditaely they went, OH that is USEFUL for my audience if we pivot it this way or that. BOOM! Now if we can just hire someone to do this stuff for us full time, since we are gonna have an awesome PR person to help promote this stuff soon, we could have some REAL fun.

My recommendation for you guys in SEO, if you aren’t getting the budgets you “think” you deserve start building stuff on your own dime, show your clients what you can do.

Remember you didn’t go to college to be a “do-follow link builder” or an “awesome comment spammer” right? and if your boss / clients still can’t be convinced, just apply to work here

Whats next?

I know some of the data is wrong, like craigslist is WAY profitable, its just that they are a non profit…we already found 5 issues, that will be fixed. But please let us know anything you see off and we’ll fix it, and we will also keep adding to this regularly w/ our friends at o3.

Oh it would be fun to work on the URLs and make them indexable, individually if we could get time, someone wanna help with a recco or two on that, I’m swamped